My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

The Turkish governor pays a formal visit and we enjoy one of those silent and impressive interviews over chibooks and coffee; in which nothing is said that one can regret. We finally make the governor a complimentary speech, which Hoseyn, who only knows a little table-English, pretends to translate. The Bey replies, talking very rapidly for two or three minutes. When we asked Hoseyn to translate, he smiled and said—“Thank you”—which was no doubt the long palaver.

The governor conducts us through the sugar-factory, which is not on so grand a scale as those we shall see later, but hot enough and sticky enough, and then gives us the inevitable coffee in his office; seemingly, if you clap your hands anywhere in Egypt, a polite and ragged attendant will appear with a tiny cup of coffee.

The town is just such a collection of mud-hovels as the others, and we learn nothing new in it. Yes, we do. We learn how to scour brass dishes. We see at the doorway of a house where a group of women sit on the ground waiting for their hair to grow, two boys actively engaged in this scouring process. They stand in the dishes, which have sand in them, and, supporting themselves by the side of the hut, whirl half-way round and back. The soles of their feet must be like leather. This method of scouring is worth recording, as it may furnish an occupation for boys at an age when they are usually, and certainly here, useless.

The weekly market is held in the open air at the edge of the town. The wares for sale are spread upon the ground, the people sitting behind them in some sort of order, but the crowd surges everywhere and the powdered dust rises in clouds. It is the most motley assembly we have seen. The women are tattooed on the face and on the breast; they wear anklets of bone and of silver, and are loaded with silver ornaments. As at every other place where a fair, a wedding, or a funeral attracts a crowd, there are some shanties of the Ghawazees, who are physically superior to the other women, but more tattooed, their necks, bosoms and waists covered with their whole fortune in silver, their eyelids heavily stained with Kohl—bold-looking jades, who come out and stare at us with a more than masculine impudence.

The market offers all sorts of green country produce, and eggs, corn, donkeys, sheep, lentils, tobacco, pipe-stems, and cheap ornaments in glass. The crowd hustles about us in a troublesome manner, showing special curiosity about the ladies, as if they had rarely seen white women. Ahmed and another sailor charge into them with their big sticks to open a passage for us, but they follow us, commenting freely upon our appearance. The sailors jabber at them and at us, and are anxious to get us back to the boat; where we learn that the natives “not like you.” The feeling is mutual, though it is discouraging to our pride to be despised by such barbarous half-clad folk.

Beggars come to the boat continually for backsheesh; a tall juggler in a white, dirty tunic, with a long snake coiled about his neck, will not go away for less than half a piastre. One tariff piastre (five cents) buys four eggs here, double the price of former years, but still discouraging to a hen. However, the hens have learned to lay their eggs small. All the morning we are trading in the desultory way in which everything is done here, buying a handful of eggs at a time, and live chickens by the single one.

In the afternoon the boat is tracked along through a land that is bursting with richness, waving with vast fields of wheat, of lentils, of sugar-cane, interspersed with melons and beans. The date-palms are splendid in stature and mass of crown. We examine for the first time the Dôm Palm, named from its shape, which will not flourish much lower on the river than here. Its stem grows up a little distance and then branches in two, and these two limbs each branch in two; always in two. The leaves are shorter than those of the date-palm and the tree is altogether more scraggy, but at a little distance it assumes the dome form. The fruit, now green, hangs in large bunches a couple of feet long; each fruit is the size of a large Flemish Beauty pear. It has a thick rind, and a stone, like vegetable ivory, so hard that it is used for drill-sockets. The fibrous rind is gnawed off by the natives when it is ripe and is said to taste like gingerbread. These people live on gums and watery vegetables and fibrous stuff that wouldn't give a northern man strength enough to gather them.

We find also the sont acacia here, and dig the gum-arabic from its bark. In the midst of a great plain of wheat, intersected by ditches and raised footways we come upon a Safciya, embowered in trees, which a long distance off makes itself known by the most doleful squeaking. These water-wheels, which are not unlike those used by the Persians, are not often seen lower down the river, where the water is raised by the shadoof. Here we find a well sunk to the depth of the Nile, and bricked up. Over it is a wheel, upon which is hung an endless rope of palm fibres and on its outer rim are tied earthen jars. As the wheel revolves these jars dip into the well and coming up discharge the water into a wooden trough, whence it flows into channels of earth. The cogs of this wheel fit into another, and the motive power of the clumsy machine is furnished by a couple of oxen or cows, hitched to a pole swinging round an upright shaft. A little girl, seated on the end of the pole is driving the oxen, whose slow hitching gait, sets the machine rattling and squeaking as if in pain, Nothing is exactly in gear, the bearings are never oiled; half the water is spilled before it gets to the trough; but the thing keeps grinding on, night and day, and I suppose has not been improved or changed in its construction for thousands of years.

During our walk we are attended by a friendly crowd of men and boys; there are always plenty of them who are as idle as we are, and are probably very much puzzled to know why we roam about in this way. I am sure a New England farmer, if he saw a troop of these Arabs, strolling through his corn-field, would set his dogs on them.

Both sides of the river are luxuriant here. The opposite bank, which is high, is lined with shadoofs, generally in sets of three, in order to raise the water to the required level. The view is one long to remember:—the long curving shore, with the shadoofs and the workmen, singing as they dip; people in flowing garments moving along the high bank, and processions of donkeys and camels as well; rows of palms above them, and beyond the purple Libyan hills, in relief against a rosy sky, slightly clouded along the even mountain line. In the foreground the Nile is placid and touched with a little color.